Germany OKs $5 Billion for Nazis’ Slave Laborers

Germany’s Parliament on Thursday approved a $5-billion compensation fund for surviving Nazi-era slave laborers, enshrining in law a long-promised atonement for more than 1.2 million victims of the Third Reich.

The 556-42 vote by the Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament, clears the way for payments to the aging victims, whose claims have traveled a tortured legal path for years. The first checks for up to $7,500 each are expected to be sent out by the end of the year.

“Your decision will help keep the past from being forgotten and ensure a future in which such atrocities will never be repeated,” Otto Lambsdorff, the government’s chief proponent for settling Holocaust claims, told the lawmakers and dignitaries assembled for the vote in the historic Reichstag building. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was among those in attendance.

In an accompanying resolution, the lawmakers offered a formal apology for the crimes of the Nazis and their despotic quest for world domination.

“With this law, a historic and moral responsibility is addressed with a long-overdue humanitarian and financial gesture,” the parliamentary resolution reads.

Final agreement on the details of a compensation program announced in December was hammered out last month after protracted legal wrangling. Some German companies contributing to the fund, which is jointly financed by government and industry, wanted ironclad guarantees that they would face no further lawsuits.

The U.S. chief negotiator, Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart E. Eizenstat, had argued that Washington was unable to oblige the independent U.S. judiciary to any such terms. He promised, though, that the U.S. government would urge any court to refer a new claim against German industry to the compensation program.

Germany’s federal government and nearly 3,000 companies here have pledged to make $5 billion available for compensation, although the fund is still about $1 billion short.

“All German companies, including those formed after the war, should contribute to the fund,” Lambsdorff urged in his address to the lawmakers. “Those unburdened by the past should still do their part to shape the future.”

A signing ceremony for the compensation deal is planned for July 17. But the German government will still need several months to solicit, review and address claims by the estimated 240,000 former slave laborers alive today and as many as 1 million other people who were forced to work for the Third Reich and have not been compensated.

The German government already has paid an estimated $60 billion in compensation to Holocaust survivors and others imprisoned or dispossessed by the Nazis.

The Third Reich enslaved at least 10 million people, mostly Jewish targets of the Nazis’ racist schemes, to work in its factories and munitions plants during the war that claimed 55 million lives.